01 August 2014

Rarely
has civilian death been so propagandized by so many of our fellow
Americans. Oh, now, I know they’ll protest this characterization. They
hate — just hate — the horrific loss of life in Gaza. They hate it so
much that they’re moved to wax as eloquently as they can about the
horror of death in schools, in mosques, in hospitals — all the places
where people are supposed to be “safe,” supposed to seek “refuge.” They
can’t stop writing about this death, emoting about this death. And they
write and emote until you can almost see the splash of their crocodile
tears on your computer screen.

They love peace, you see. They love
it so much that they attempt to use every one of their God-given gifts
to make you feel what a Palestinian widow feels, to make you stand in
the shoes of a man weeping for his lost son. Feel the ultimate anguish.
Hear the wailing. Don’t look away from the blood or the rage or the
tears.

Have hundreds of thousands of parents and children and
aunts and uncles shed similar tears in Syria? Look away from that. No,
look away. I mean it. I need your eyes to focus back where they should —
on that dead Palestinian child.

Have tens of thousands of
jihadist suicide bombers torn women and children limb from limb in a
swathe of destruction from North Africa to Pakistan and beyond? Don’t
look there. Look at this U.N. school in Gaza. No, not at the rockets in
the corner. Don’t look there. Look at the broken body of this school
teacher. See the emotional devastation and physical pain of her young,
wounded daughter.

Are those smoke trails in the sky that I see? Of
rockets aimed at Israeli villages and even Israeli airports, launched
amid fervent prayers that they would penetrate Israel’s missile shield
and find their own way to an Israeli home or passenger jet? Above all,
don’t look there. Or if you do, think of them as gestures of civil
disobedience — as small, meaningless acts of rebellion in the face of
monstrous injustice.

Yesterday, I took some time to see what
people of faith are saying and writing about the war. And as I did, I
saw a great deal of advocacy for terrorists — advocacy masked in the
language of compassion.This piece, in Patheos,
is a perfect representation. Called “Sitting with Pain in Gaza and
Israel,” the writer — a poet named Richard Chess — reflects on Mohammed
Omer’s New York Times Op-Ed, “Darkness Falls on Gaza,” itself a piece of death-glorifying emotional propaganda.

Here’s Chess:

I hunger for the stories, the lived
experience, the telling details. Enough with the rationales, the
justifications, the opinions, the politics-spin-politics-spin. Give me
the story of one mother. Give me the story of a daughter, a son.

Translation: Let me tell you the story I want to tell, the one that is free of the thoughts I don’t want you to think.

So, now, let’s think about the glories of Islam:

Ramadan:
maybe you don’t know much about Ramadan. But how much do you need to
know to appreciate values cultivated by its observance? Believe in
self-discipline? It takes self-discipline to observe a day-long fast,
day after day after day for twenty-nine or thirty days. How about family
and community? Observing Ramadan strengthens bonds among family and
friends who join together at the end of each day’s fast to share a meal.

But if our sympathies aren’t aroused by the glories of Islam, well let’s try something else:

If
you, dear American reader, cannot relate to Ramadan, maybe your
sympathies are aroused by this: the victims of this story have no place
to hide, not even places conventionally considered off limits to
military attacks: a mosque, a hospital, a school.

And when the reader wants to rebel, wants to point out the reality that Hamas wants civilians to die, we get this:

(Yes,
but. Yes, but. I know. I know. I know. They hide _____ there. They live
among _____. They this, they that, they the other, which is why we must
this, that, and the other, heroically trying to minimize harm to
uninvolved people.)

And then there’s the crowning insult:

Now
meet the al-Baba family, a family of fifteen. A “corrugated tin roof,”
Omer tells us, was all that stood between them and the bombs.” Because
other families have been killed in their homes, when a drone is heard
overhead, “for safety, [Mr. al-Baba] split [his] family into different
rooms—a scene played out in nearly every home in Gaza, a grim shell game
of family members.”

I know this story! It’s the story of Jacob,
on the eve of his reunion with Esau, dividing his family, herds, and
camels into several camps, so that if Esau and the 400 men accompanying
him were to attack, Jacob wouldn’t lose everyone and everything dear to
him.

The deaths of Palestinians are special deaths,
more horrible than Syrian deaths. The Palestinian effort to survive echo
the struggles of the Patriarchs. The glory. The heroism. The pain. The
injustice.

There is a word for this kind of writing and thinking.

Evil.

This
person is a willing accomplice in a monstrous wrong. Hamas protects its
ability to kill Jews by ensuring that many, many Palestinians die
and that people like Mr. Chess and Mr. Omer see those deaths, write
about those deaths, and put those deaths in front of every American eye.
And if not enough Americans are outraged, more Palestinian children
must perish. Hamas will continue to kill children as long as that
strategy continues to yield rich rewards in western sympathy. Only then
will the terror tunnels survive. Only then will the rocket stockpiles
persist. Only then will Hamas live to kill as many people as it can as
long as it can until the Jews of Israel give up and flee their own
land.

I have no patience for this kind of cowardly evil. I will
believe the tears when they are shed for all innocents, and I will lend
credence to the rage when it is directed at true injustice. Until then,
the poets, the journalists, the writers who wallow in Palestinian
suffering are nothing more than shills for terrorists as vile as the SS —
who lack only the military strength to show the world what they would
do to Israel and her people.

29 July 2014

Protesters
take part in a 'Stop the War' demonstration march from the Israeli
Embassy to the Houses of Parliament on 26 July 2014 in London. (Photo:
Getty)

By Brendan O'Neill

There has been a lot of talk over the past two weeks about whether it
is anti-Semitic to oppose Israel’s attack on Gaza. Radical Leftists and
liberal commentators have insisted (perhaps a bit too much?) that there
is nothing remotely anti-Semitic about their anger with Israel or their
fury on behalf of battered, bruised and bombed Palestinians. And of
course they are right that it is entirely possible to oppose Israel’s
militarism without harbouring so much as a smidgen of dislike for the
Jewish people. Some will oppose the war in Gaza simply because they are
against wars in general, especially ones that impact on civilians.

However, it seems pretty clear to me that much of the left in Europe
and America is becoming more anti-Semitic, or at least risks falling
into the trap of anti-Semitism, sometimes quite thoughtlessly. In the
language it uses, in the ideas it promotes, in the way in which it talks
about the modern world, including Israel, much of the Left has adopted a
style of politics that has anti-Semitic undertones, and sometimes
overtones. The key problem has been the Left’s embrace of conspiratorial
thinking, its growing conviction that the world is governed by what it
views as uncaring “cabals”, “networks”, self-serving lobbyists and gangs
of bankers, all of which has tempted it to sometimes turn its
attentions towards those people who historically were so often the
object and the target of conspiratorial thinking – the Jews.

Yes, one can hate Israel’s attack on Gaza without hating the Jews.
But there’s no denying that the hatred being expressed for Israel’s
attack on Gaza is different to the opposition to all other acts
of militarism in recent times. Just compare the huge 2003 Hyde Park
demo against the Iraq War with the recent London demos against Israel’s
attack on Gaza. The former had an air of resignation; it expressed a
mild, middle-class sense of disappointment with Tony Blair, through
safe, soft slogans like “Not In My Name”. The latter, by contrast, have
been fiery and furious, with screeching about murder and mayhem and
demands that the Israeli ambassador to the UK be booted out. Some
attendees have held up placards claiming that Zionists control the British media while others have accused both London and Washington of “grovelling” before an apparently awesomely powerful Israeli Lobby.

This is a recurring theme in anti-Israel sentiment today: the idea
that a powerful, sinister lobby of Israel lovers has warped our
otherwise respectable leaders here in the West, basically winning
control of Western foreign policy. You see it in cartoons depicting
Israeli leaders as thepuppet masters of politicians like William Hague andTony Blair. You can hear it in Alexi Sayle’s much-tweeted claim that the “Western powers” kowtow to Israel because they are“frightened of it… frightened of the powerthat it wields”. You can see it in the arguments of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their popular book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,
which holds an apparently super-powerful pro-Israel lobby in the heart
of Washington responsible for the Iraq War and all other kinds of
disasters. The claim is often made that Israel has corrupted Western
officials, commanding them to carry out its dirty work.

Sound familiar? Yes, this has terrible echoes of the old racist idea
that Jewish groups controlled Western politics and frequently propelled
the world into chaos – an idea that was especially popular in the early
to mid-20th-century Europe. Very often, anti-Israel protesters treat
Israel not just as a nation at war – like Britain, America or France,
which also frequently launch wars that kill huge numbers of civilians –
but also as the warper of policy and morality in the West, as a source
of poison in global affairs, as the architect of instability across the
globe. Indeed, a few years ago a poll of Europeans found that a majority
of them view Israel as “the biggest threat to world peace”. So Israel
is undoubtedly singled out by Leftists and others, and even more
significantly it is singled out in a way that the Jews used to be
singled out – that is, as a sinister, self-serving corrupter of nations
and causer of chaos.

Much of today’s anti-Israel protesting has a conspiracy-theory feel
to it, with its talk about powerful lobby groups designing wars behind
closed doors in order to isolate Israel’s enemies and boost Israel’s
fortunes. And this is in keeping with Left-wing politics generally,
today. The Left has increasingly embraced a conspiracy-theory view of
the world. It is now very common to hear Leftists talk about the “cabals of neocons”who control world affairs, or the “cult of bankers” who wreak havoc on our economies, or the Murdoch Empire that “orchestrates public life from the shadows”
(to quote Labour MP Tom Watson). All seriously analytical and nuanced
readings of international trends and political dynamics have been
elbowed aside by contemporary Leftists, who prefer instead to argue that
dark, hidden, mysterious forces are ruining politics, plotting wars,
and enriching themselves at the expense of the poor. And, as history
shows us, there is a thin line between railing against wicked cabals and
cults and wondering out loud whether the Jews are secretly running
world affairs, or at least wielding a disproportionate influence.

Indeed, some of the most influential trends in Left-wing politics
over the past five years – including the Occupy movement and the
Wikileaks movement – were both given to conspiracy-theorising and both
also had a bit of a problem with anti-Semitism. So Occupy was
kickstarted by Adbusters, a magazine convinced that powerful
corporations control the masses’ fickle minds. In 2004, Adbusters
published a disgustingly anti-Semitic article titled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”,
which listed the neocons in the Bush administration and put a black
mark next to the names of those who are Jewish. Not surprisingly, Occupy
itself, which was obsessed with the baleful influence of small cliques
of bankers and other faceless, evil people, often crossed the line into
anti-Semitism, as the Washington Post reported. And Wikileaks, too, which is also a borderline conspiracy-theory outfit, what with its obsession with the “conspiratorial interactions among thepolitical elite”, has had issues with anti-Semitism: one of its key researchers, Israel Shamir, was exposed by the Guardian as being“notorious for [his] Holocaust denial and publishing a string of anti-Semitic articles”.

It is not an accident that the three key planks of the Left-wing
outlook today – the anti-Israel anti-war sentiment, the shallow
anti-capitalism of Occupy, and the worship of those who leak info from
within the citadels of power – should all have had issues with
anti-Semitism. It is because the left, feeling isolated from the public
and bereft of any serious means for understanding modern political and
economic affairs, has bought into a super-simplistic, black-and-white,
borderline David Icke view of the world as a place overrun and ruled by
cabals and cults and sinister lobby groups. And who has always, without
fail, been the final cabal, the last cult, to find themselves
shouldering the ultimate blame for the warped, hidden workings of
politics, the economy and foreign turmoil? You got it – the Jews.

All of the above have something in
common and it isn't Israel or 'evil, white American/European
colonialism.'

From Ace:

Atheist Sam Harris: Here’s Why I Don’t Criticize Israel

After establishing his secular/atheist credentials, and noting
his objection go any state organized around religious identity (though
he allows that if it were permissible for any state to be organized
around a religious identity, that permitted state would be Israel, given
the need for an Escape Hatch for the world’s Jews as proven by just
about all of the history of the last several thousand years), he begins
explaining why he stands with Israel.

This is a long piece. I’m just excerpting parts of his best
argument. I’m also cutting out a lot of his nuances, because, well, I
can’t just excerpt everything.

[T]his gets to the heart of the moral difference between
Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of
Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side
would do if they had the power to do it.

What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do
anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because
they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could
kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means
that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian
children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident.
They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as
they want….

What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the
power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would
do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the
worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of
itself.

…

Consider the moral difference between using human shields and
being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The
Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by
the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be…